Parents and their Children

Ladies' Mirror, Volume V, Issue 6, 1 December 1926, Page 84

Parents and their Children

A young mother, recounting her experiences when taking her little girl to introduce her to the Kindergarten mistress on the first day of school, says that she went with the idea of amazing the authorities by her description of Sybil's cleverness and achievements at five tears of age. She found a dozen other mothers waiting for their interview. and had the good fortune to hear the opinions of these parents, who also seemed to have brought intellectual prodigies to lighten the humdrum ways of the school. At least six little Paulines were the possessors of far too active brains, and their mothers felt the remedy was learning to read as soon as possible ; they also gave promise of a brilliant future in mathematics, as they loved to count everything; and their insatiable desire for stories and poetry showed a distinct bent for authorship. Six little Philippas had equally remarkable talents; but here, it was fell that the hearing-rein was needed : they must he held hack, lest pressure, from without and within, should result in meningitis or other disasters to the delicately poised trains and nervous systems. As Sybil’s mother listened she suddenly realised with amusement and some self-mockery that what she, in common with all these other mothers, had thought brilliant and unusual in her child were characteristics common to all normal children; and grateful that this awakening had come in good time, she abandoned her child to the lender mercies of the Kindergarten mistress with no more introduction than “This is Sybil, and heal a hasty retreat. As she went home she wondered if one could ever positively say that a child was destined to he clever or not. and asked herself what exactly is meant by cleverness. Was it the memorising of certain facts and ideas prescribed by a school curriculum hoary with the tradition of the ages r Gould the. child who learned to read in a month keep the pace in all the other branches of knowledge throughout school life?

The Creative Mind of the Child and its Latent Powers

TIT TV. may consider the well-auth-enticated facts of the school records of some famous people when we, too, seek to answer these questions. Darwin was incapable of mastering any language, and when he left school he says. “I was considered by all my masters and by my lather a very ordinary boy rather below the common standard in intellect. To my deep mortification, my father once said to me. 1 You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will he a disgrace to yourself and all your family.' ” Napoleon graduated forty-second it his class. “Who," asks a thoughttil man, "were the forty-one above him;'" Humphry Davy, .Goldsmith, and many others showed no sign at school of the powers they afterwards displayed. The school record, therefore. is no criterion of the child's intelligence or intellectual powers, for the brilliant man or woman was often prescribed as dull at school, and vice versa. According to school standard, many so-called clever children arc merely receptive and fortunately endowed with retentive powers, and these same standards by their narrowness may balk the larger-matured child with high ideals, and so this child is considered dull or indolent. The stultifying effects of a narrow curriculum are too often seen in the little offenders against the majesty of the law who find their way into the juvenile Courts. Boys who are born leaders, with initiative and ability to carry through courageous with the result that they find themacts. have no outlet for these gifts, selves in disgrace and offenders at an early age. The child who prefer* to find occupations and his own methods of carrying them through, without advice or help is often stigmatised as wilful, whereas this probably is a clever child who should be given scope and freedom, and interference and attempts at thwarting him tactfully avoided, or disastrous consequences will result. Initiative is the primary test of the clever child, and this should be sympathetically dealt with from the

first, for if it is encouraged exceptional talents may become prominent. jC'ach of the following types should be regarded as belonging to the realm of cleverness equally with that generally considered alone worthy of the title: they are all directed by mental activity, whether manifested through muscular or imaginative outlets. First, there is the child who manages concrete situations, and this power is shown very markedly in the constructive work of the early stages. If this interest is satisfied

in early life and allowed to develop, in exceptional cases it may branch out into scientific or artistic interests. For instance. Isaac Newton spent his leisure making many ingenious toys —a windmill turned either by the wind or by the mouse enclosed in it, which he called the miller; a mechanical carriage, moved by the person who sat in it; a water-clock and other things. A sickly, solitary, absent-minded boy, who took a lowplace in school, yet satisfied his own interests in spite of the school, and his wonderfully original work in mathematics and physics can he traced as a development of his first childish excursions into their realms. We probably owe the marvellous efficiency of our Army Service Corps to an interest of this kind in the boyhood of Sir Redvcrs Fuller. He was called a clever boy who would tint work at school. In his

biography is a charming pencil sketch of a little train of trucks (in which are seated his brothers and sisters), manufactured from pack-ing-cases by the boy who afterwards called into being the great transport system in the British Army. Secondly, there is the child who show's power of commanding and managing people at an early age, and usually has the defect of this quality in his contempt for authority. Clashes often occur when this born leader is not allowed to undertake the responsibilities of leadership. This, too, should be recognised

as a gift without the fear of the leader becoming a tyrant or a bully. On the contrary, through his mistakes and failures he will learn that there are other points of view than his own, and the leader should become the man or woman of wide outlook, sympathetic and gentle towards the weaker, yet at the same time capable of taking a firm stand i.t questions involving moral issues. /General Gordon, as a boy, was no hookworm, but famous as the possessor of high spirits and with powers of leadership which often made him the terror of his superiors. Robert Clive was renowned at the different schools he attended for his boldness and insubordination. His biographer says he would not learn and was the leader in all broils and escapades, but “at all events he learned to lead.” In a third class are the children for whom the school has catered so

efficiently in the past and even in the present the precocious child. They are few and far between, but are still considered as the only ones who have the right to the title “clever.” Mrs. Meynell, in one of her interesting essays on children tells us that “time was when childhood was but borne with, and that for the sake of its mere promise of manhood ; education was nothing but an impatient prophecy of the full stature of mind and body." This impatience of immaturity and eagerness to hasten through children’s spring, with all its own pecu-l.-ar loveliness of slow development in the course of nature, seems to have been a characteristic of the parents of all ages, and unnatural precocity afforded to some at least an exquisite joy. John Evelyn, in his diary of 1658, writing of his little son Richard, says: “At three years old he read any character or letter used in our printed books, and had gotten by heart before he was five, 700 or 800 Latin and Greek words, together with their genders and declensions. . . . More to be admired was the loveliness of his judgment, that being much affected with the diagrams of Euclid he could interpret to me many of the common postulates and definitions which he would readily repeat in Latin, and apply. He was in one hour only taught to play the first half of a thorough-bass to one of our church psalms upon the organ. . . . Let no man think we did hereby crowd his spirit too full of notions. Those things which wc force upon other children were strangely natural to him.” As this little boy died before he was five and a-half years old, we cannot tell what he would have become. Stevenson, with whimsical wisdom, says: “Though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from school honours with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their medals that they may not afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin the world bankrupt.” And Richard Evelyn might have been a dire disappointment. To obtain this background of culture, to force the child’s intellectual development has been the anxious desire of those who wish to call their children “clever,” and in the process childish traits and desires have been repressed, together with those instincts and impulses which psychologists now tell us hold promise for the future, if allowed to develop naturally. ' I 'he modern outlook is wider and saner; parents are coming to understand and express sympathy with ih?ir children; consequently the child's behaviour is antural to a degree that would have scandalised our forefathers, as would the parents' desire to live with and for their children and to gain their confidence. 1 t •

Two difficulties possibly beset parents in carrying out this ideal: on the one hand it is so hard to remember how one felt and acted as a child, and on the other many parents have had no adult experience of little children before marrying, and, being faced with their own small enigmas, consequently they may fall into errors not unlike those we have been deploring. Instead of urging the child to be clever, many parents to-day assume that truly their duckling is a swan, as there lurks in most parental hearts the desire for their own to outshine someone else’s child, and this becomes more prominent when the child enters the competitive arena of school. One can hardly expect that other people's children should make the same appeal as one’s own. but there is much that can be learned from a study of these, and the open-minded parent of broad sympathies thus gains much knowledge for the solution of his or her particular problem. “Only with children who have specialised intellectual abilities is it possible to secure mental activity without participation of the organs of sense and muscles of the hand and eye.” It is right that this type should be given every opportunity to develop their gifts through the school to the university, and to give the best of their powers for the benefit of mankind. Speaking generally, there is no fear of this class being overlooked. Intellectual cleverness seems to be easily recognised and joyfully hailed, as we have seen in the past; it is to the other types recognition has come and still comes more slowly. Let us realise that there are “diversities of gifts” and that “every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner and another after that.” Not from the child’s reactions to the school curriculum, with its analysis and abstractions, must the child’s powers be assessed; his title to real ability must depend upon his attitude to life-situation— life itself. We should not be too concerned with one type of cleverness, but recognising each child’s peculiar gift give to it scope and guidance, so that the best and highest development for each is possible. Ours is the responsibility for this development; and, as the smoothing of the path for little feet is ours too, we shall do our utmost to avoid placing stumbling blocks in their way, by which their gifts and powers will be hindered and misdirected. SW Man proposes: and the Divorce Court exposes. Marriage: The Vision. Divorce : The Re-Vision.